Monday Monday...

[feren]

Today I survived work, which is a good thing.

Today at work I learned that jwz has it right, you must be this tall to touch the mailer. It's truly amazing to me how people can land jobs in IT in today's economy and still manage to completely ignore the simplest things. For example, today's burst of insanity was because nobody bothered to read the rather detailed error messages that SMTP was generating on the bounced messages. Should the error details be in flashing neon pink, people? Do you need the protocol to hold your hand? Let's see you get that level of error reporting out of NFS. Go on, I dare you.

I found out that the current colocation facility for my server is going to disappear in about two weeks. Now I must begin a mad scramble to find the server a new home that will treat it right and meet my needs. If I can't do that I will probably end up spending $99 a month to have a dedicated server at an ISP, which is about my last resort at this point. Does anybody have suggestions on hosting facilities? I need to have full control over the box, meaning I want it to be UNIX of some type, I want to be able to switch-user to root at any time and install any software package I want.

I took a few pictures of the moon tonight with my SLR and the big macro lens. I couldn't resist the opportunity that presented itself when I noticed the moon hanging enormous over the roof of the next apartment unit... with the night sky is so clear this evening and the moon so bright it all begged for some attempts at long exposure photography. I'm sure I looked like a goon in the parking lot, trying to steady my camera on top of a pile of books that I'd set atop the Expedition's roof (I really need a tripod. I really, really need a tripod. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll get one for Christmas with a nice ball head). Hopefully at least one of the photographs will turn out the way I intended it to. I'm really anxious to see what it looks like when the film is developed, I'm afraid that with the extended exposure and nonstable surface I got some jitter that might cause streaking.

I'm getting all my paperwork in order to buy a house. More accurately I'm getting all my financial ducks in a row to go prequalify for a mortgage. It's awe-inspiring, it's terrifying and it's really confusing. It's a huge commitment! It's something I should have done quite some time ago, and something I plan to rectify shortly. You know what makes me look forward the most to being a homeowner? It's not the equity, it's not the expanded room, it's not the pride in having a slice of the American dream.... oh no, not me. I'm looking forward to being able to vacuum the carpet in the nude without anybody being able to complain. Yes, I am a simple creature. Mean, but simple.

I got to see a pencil sketch of my commission with Richard Bartrop, more commonly known in the fandom as "Lord Grey." I haven't heard anything from him in over 8 months and was getting a little disillusioned with things (I was starting to figure that the money was long gone, the second time that's happened to me with an artist), but last night he sent me the URL to a pencil sketch he had done. To be honest... it's not what I had in mind when I described the scene to him, not by a long shot. I'm not sure if I like it, but it's an interesting interpretation of what I gave him to work with. In a way I am actually intrigued by it now that I start to think about it some more... the way he's portraying my character is immensely different from the way you've seen him in other drawings. With any luck the finished product will be produced in a very short amount of time, and when I get it I think it will be one of the more unique pieces in my little collection.

The drummer relaxes and waits between shows

Comments

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

I'm running a client's small site on a Cobalt RaQ at ValueWeb.

It works best if you set the web and mail stuff up through the web interface, but you do get root, and can install anything you want/need. Like, I installed SpamAssassin.

It's cheaper than the virtual hosting she contracted for years ago. I do like that every bit of that machine is available to me. I can look at logs, force a reboot, set up mail filtering. There's no ISP to tell me that procmail support is going away.

It's worth a look.

[feren.livejournal.com]

Can you do more than just host a website? My current server has:

Twelve web sites

MySQL database server that powers a number of the websites

E-mail accounts for people on those twelve sites

DNS services (primary and secondary)

Two MUSHs

An IRC server

A webmail system

POP3 for those who have e-mail accounts

FTP server

VNC

a bunch of other stuff

Those are all things I need to continue to have access to. Does the ValueWeb solution let me install those things? I thought they just did "FTP your website here and move content around through a web control panel" services...

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

The $49 box they're leasing is a 300Mhz AMD-K6 running Linux. The RaQ is a commodity server, with value-add stuff designed to make it easier to administer. It's not really what you or I might be used to in a bare bones Linux, but it suffices. Take a look at some of the stuff on the web to decide if this kind of thing is what you'd want.

All of ValueWeb's dedicated server offers get you root (log in to the admin account and su), so you can install whatever you want. The 500Gb/mo transfer is pretty sweet too.

You can set up a number of virtual hosts for Apache, and establish user accounts (and their mailboxes) via the web. POP and IMAP are running, and FTP comes with. I installed MySQL. Got an SSH binary kit from some Cobalt user group and turned off Telnet.

You get root, but I've decided to use the web interface to set up most of the services. You *could* go modify the config files yourself, but I found it easier to just go with the Web interface, in sort of a modify-and-check-the-real-configs loop. I took the attitude that while I could circumvent the 'easy' interface, if the machine smoked (and ValueWeb gave me another one to work on), I had less to do if it only involved uploading the setup again. You see, everything you set up in the web page can be downloaded in one file, and restored to a virgin machine.

The web interface lets you set up authoritative DNS, and ValueWeb will point a secondary at it for you.

It does not have an X11 installation, so I dunno what VNC would get you. I don't know if I'd try to run X on the RaQ due to the low CPU power available.

The $49 deal worked great for my client: Small, simple site, but I had a few involved CGI scripts and spam filtering set up, and I wanted to have full control over the server. They've got other deals that are a bit more, if you need more oomph.

I've liked their customer service. I haven't had any real problems to speak of, but they gave me pointers to the SSH kit, and I think I had a question once that they got me the right answer to in quick fashion.